Mathematics Department Student Colloquium
August 22, 2012 at Purdue University.
Talk given:
Abstract: How many colors do you need to color a map so no adjacent countries match? How many different platonic solids are there? When visiting a large number of cities, how easy is it to find an optimal ordering? Just how difficult is Dr. Naughton’s job of fitting hundreds of teaching assignments into the fragmented schedules of over a hundred humans? To try to answer these, we turn to Graph theory—it’s not just the best and most fun field in Math; it’s also the most versatile! We’ll walk through basic definitions and build to a discussion of some of the above famous graph theory problems, and finish by looking at the Ramsey Theory problem that Erdos joked we should sooner try to defeat alien invaders than attempt to solve.